Mr. Holmes has retired -

"A Damaged Literacy of Bees"
manipulated fractal flame & digital drawing by Mick Mather

"Hallo," Holmes said. "See here, Russell, it must be more than complaisance applied to the saving graces."
"How do you mean?"
"It's quite apparent that there's more than a shift of a mannered semantic. I see a complete paradigm shift of the literacy," he asserted.
"I don't mean to be repetitive, Holmes, but..."
"Observe the cells, Russell, especially the cells," he went on, "they've abandoned the hexagon. See how they've been squared away? Even the botched wax sealing aspires to the new shape."
"Of course!" his illuminated partner agreed, "including a haphazard attempt at checker boarding."
"Exactly," said Holmes over peaked hands, "elementary to a new literacy."
"I should think it much too early for assigning new text to a single, dead hive," Russell posited.
"Quite so," Holmes relinquished after many minutes of thought. "We shall keep our eyes sharp, then."

Illustration Friday: Balloon -

"Balloon II"
digitally manipulated tempera-on-paper painting by Mick Mather

This week, Illustration Friday offers the theme of balloon. Since I'm on vacation and trying to get back to my Sherlock Holmes stories, I've cheated just a little bit. If this looks familiar, perhaps some will remember this image from The Toys Series that was posted back in May if my reckoning is right. I used an alternate version, recolored it and put it here for all to see. Now, where was I? Oh yes, in the words of Mr. Holmes, "Come, Watson, Come! The game is afoot."

Hey Diddle Diddle -

"The Bandbox Hat"
digital collage by Mick Mather

While fiddling around with a pattern for gaiters, a word that crops up in a lot of the Sherlock Holmes stories by the way, one thing led to another. As I began adding some drawn shapes and moving things around, out popped this hat, peculiar to marching bands whose uniforms, as coincidence would have it, often include gaiters.

Ha! Observe, Watson -

"Holmes and Watson"
digital collage by Mick Mather

One of the great joys over my two weeks of vacation, now passed, was reading a collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes. The bulk of the 3-dozen mysteries and adventures were originally published in The Strand Magazine in England in the late 1800's through the early 1900's. The edition, being a facsimile reproduction, bears a secondary treat of a few hundred of Sidney Paget's perfect pen & ink illustrations. You might imagine my great surprise that, one afternoon, having sneaked into the studio and switched on the computer for a bit of fun, out popped this tribute to that fine artist. Having recently completed "That Hideous Strength" (the 3rd book in The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis) I had grown quite accustomed to the peculiarities of the British Voice and delved a bit deeper therein from reading the short stories by Conan Doyle. Not everyone's cup o' tea as I well know, but they've been, as already said, a very high point of my well spent down time.